As a mom do you ever just feel plain ridiculous? I do. Take the other day. I was standing in the kitchen around 4 p.m., shuffling pots to make macaroni and cheese for my son. The late afternoon meal was on top of the egg and cheese omelet and bowl of oatmeal I made him for breakfast, the pasta, applesauce, banana, water and juice I packed in his lunch, and the full chicken dinner I was then sticking in the oven.

Whats with the Betty Crocker overdrive?

My 7-year-old son refuses to eat his lunch at school. This is nothing new. Hes been not eating lunch at school for years now. But he just started first grade and things are getting serious. Hes got real work to accomplish and I worry over his ability to concentrate. So once again Ive embarked on a quest for the right lunch.

Earlier this summer, I thought my worries were over. Circumstances forced us into a picnic of deli-made ham and cheese sandwiches. Sitting in the sand munching on a hot, summer afternoon, he startled me by saying, I love this.

Love??? I said. But I thought you didnt like sandwiches?

I like this kind, he said, munching.

I immediately fast forwarded to the year ahead. My school lunch worries are over. Ill just make him ham and cheese sandwiches!

Maybe, just perhaps, someday, I will begin to grasp that raising a child is never that simple.

For among the many items coming home uneaten these past few weeks? A ham and cheese sandwich.

And I had such high hopes, too. The night I was making that ham and cheese sandwich I was feeling good. After stumbling around for a week trying to get my back-to-school act together, I finally had, at that moment in my refrigerator: mayonnaise, hamburger buns, and ham and cheese slices. Im such a good Mom, I thought. No hurdle is too big for me to ensure that my son has good nutrition at school!

Yet the next evening there I stood pulling out a crumpled tin-foiled sandwich from his bag. I examined the squished remnants. Where could I have gone wrong? Then I observed the bun. Ah ah. I made it with a hamburger bun, thats it.

So I bought some bread. And the next night again I laid out my ingredients substituting the whole wheat bread. I sent him off to school with high hopes. No luck. That night I opened up the backpack, pulled out the lunch bag only to find another crumpled tinfoil package.

I didnt like it, he said.

I thought back to the moment of zen on the beach. What was so special about that sandwich? I wondered. Then I remembered. It was on a hard roll!

So I set off in search of The Roll. First to the deli near me, but it didnt have any. Over at our neighborhood supermarket they were so hard they were rocks. So at 10:45 that night I found myself sitting at the computer on the FreshDirect Web site. But after ten minutes I concluded that FreshDirect doesnt carry them. Or maybe they do, somewhere on that site, but by 10:57 p.m. with the orange letters flashing 2 minutes to deadline I flagged under the pressure and logged off.

Speaking of FreshDirect, the one thing Rusty has liked this year is something called a pizza roll. Its one of their newly debuted kids lunches. On the Web it looked appealing and I ordered it, thinking, this could be it. And unbelievably it was. That evening he came home with the astonishing news, I liked it!

But there was a hitch. On the Web site it looked like a normal-sized sandwich roll. But when it arrived in my kitchen I discovered that it was the length of about half a string cheese, and not much wider. Since Id ordered two pizza roll lunches, I doubled up. But then I calculated the cost. Each kid tray cost $4.99. That lunch cost me $10 not counting the juice and apple.

So now Im sending him off in the morning with whatever the hell I can find in the refrigerator. I know he wont eat it anyway. Thats okay. It may take me a while, but even being a ridiculous mom, I eventually recognize defeat when I see it.